Northam was roundly criticized last week for supporting the killing of babies after they'd been born. Legislation Northam supported was ultimately defeated in the Virginia state legislature, but, had it passed, it would've legalized infanticide.
Northam claims he was taken out of context, but it's hard to see how else he could have been understood. He clearly favored a law that would have facilitated the killing of children. Here's what he said:
If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.He added that he thought the furor over the bill “was really blown out of proportion.”
Then, as if that wasn't trouble enough, on Friday it emerged that the hapless governor was discovered to have posed in blackface for a picture in his medical school yearbook alongside another student dressed as a Klansman (It may have been the other way around, no one knows for sure, but it hardly makes any difference).
The picture was clearly intended to demean and make fun of African Americans, and an irony in this is that Mr. Northam's successful campaign for the governorship benefitted handsomely from having painted his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, as a racist.
Calls from both left and right for the governor to resign have been increasing in volume, although I'd wager that were he a Republican the amplitude of the demands coming from the left would be exponentially greater than what they've been.
After all, as J. Christian Adams at PJ Media reminds us that former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott discovered to his sorrow that the standard of acceptable behavior is set far higher for Republicans than for Democrats.
Back in 2003, for instance, the Senate threw a birthday party for a 100-year-old colleague from South Carolina named Strom Thurmond who in his youth had been a staunch segregationist. Senator Lott offered a toast to Senator Thurmond in which he committed the unpardonable sin of lightheartedly suggesting that, had the country voted for Strom Thurmond for president when he ran in 1948, the country would be better off today.
It was an old man’s birthday. Lott never mentioned race. He was just being kind and not even thinking of the racial implications of what he was saying. Nevertheless, Adams writes, in a flash, Lott was gone from the Senate.
Lott's absent-minded insensitivity meant that he had to go, yet contemporaneously a former Klansman, the late Senator Robert Byrd (also of Virginia), had been serving in the Democratic party's top Senate positions for over three decades, and no one on the left seemed to mind.
Northam's defenders say that the offensive photo was taken in 1984 and that he's not the same man today. I sympathize with that argument. I don't think we should judge people in their late fifties simply by what they did and thought in their youth. Young men often do or say dumb, even awful, things, but people mature and change.
I believe in redemption, but here's the thing: People who sought to destroy Brett Kavanaugh for what he might have done as a teenager decades ago are hardly in a position to say now that Northam's case is different (Northam was in his mid-twenties when the photo was taken) and that he should be given a pass.
Adams points out another irony:
Just last week, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing where a representative of the NAACP testified in favor of a new federal mandate that would let all felons vote. When pressed, advocates admitted that a full restoration of rights – including the right to run for office, such as Governor of Virginia – would apply to murderers and child rapists.We can pass laws to allow felons to vote and run for office, but posing in a racially insulting photo disqualifies somebody for life from holding public office? What a topsy-turvy world we live in today. Update: This post was amended from the original to show that Northam's yearbook photo was taken when he was in medical school, not high school.
There you have it. Northam has to go because of the yearbook photo while the same gang wants to ensure that murderers and rapists can hold public office. These are things I suspect nobody in 1984 would have believed could ever come true.